Vocabulary Knowledge is...

Learning, as a language based activity, is fundamentally and profoundly dependent on vocabulary knowledge. Learners must have access to the meanings of words that teachers, or their surrogates (e.g., other adults, books, films, etc.), use to guide them into contemplating known concepts in novel ways (i.e. to learn something new).

Children enter school with "meaningful differences" in vocabulary knowledge.

What doesn't matter: race/ethnicity, gender, birth order.

What does matter: relative economic advantage.

Emergence of the Problem

In a typical hour, the average child hears:

Family Status

Actual Differences in Quantity of Words Heard

Actual Differences in Quality of Words Heard

Welfare

616 words

5 affirmations, 11 prohibitions

Working Class

1,251 words

12 affirmations, 7 prohibitions

Professional

2,153 words

32 affirmations, 5 prohibitions

Cumulative Vocabulary Experiences

Family Status

Words heard per hour

Words heard in a 100-hour week

Words heard in a 5,200 hour year

Words heard in 4 years

Welfare

616

62,000

3 million

13 million

Working Class

1,251

125,000

6 million

26 million

Professional

2,153

215,000

11 million

45 million

Meaningful Differences

By the time the children were 3 years old, parents in less economically favored circumstances had said fewer different words in their cumulative monthly vocabularies than the children in the most economically advantaged families in the same period of time.

88,533 word families result in total volumes of nearly 500,000 graphically distinct word types, including proper names. Roughly half of 500,000 words occur once or less in a billion words of text (Nagy & Anderson, 1984; see References).

An average student in grades 3 through 12 is likely to learn approximately 3,000 new vocabulary words each year, assuming he or she reads between 500,000 and a million running words of text a school year (Nagy & Anderson, 1984; see References).

Between grades 1 and 3, it is estimated that economically disadvantaged students' vocabularies increase by about 3,000 words per year and middle-class students' vocabularies increase by about 5,000 words per year.

Children's vocabulary size approximately doubles between grades 3 and 7.

Massive vocabulary growth appears to occur without much help from teachers.

Research has shown that children who read even ten minutes a day outside of school experience substantially higher rates of vocabulary growth between second and fifth grade than children who do little or no reading. (Anderson & Nagy, 1992, see
References)